Fire play: ICCARUS—Intelligent command and control, acquisition and review using simulation*

Is it possible to educate a fire officer to deal intelligentlywith the command and control of amajor fire event he will never have experienced?The authors of this paper believe there is, and present here just one solution to this training challenge. It involves the development of an intelligent simulation based upon computer managed interactive media.The expertise and content underpinning this educational development was provided by the West Midlands Fire Service. Their brief for this training programme was unambiguous and to the point: 1. Do not present the trainee with a model answer, because there are no generic fires. Each incident is novel, complex, and often ‘wicked’ in that it changes obstructively as it progresses. Thus firefighting demands that Commanders impose their individual intelligence on each problem to solve it. 2. A suitable Educational Simulator should stand alone; operate in real time; emulate as nearly as possible the ‘feel’ of the fireground; present realistic fire progress; incorporate the vast majority of those resources normally present at a real incident; bombard the trainee with information from those sources; provide as few systemprompts as possible. 3. There should also be an interrogable visual debrief which can be used after the exercise to give the trainees a firm understanding of the effects of their actions. This allows them to draw their own conclusions of their command effectiveness. Additionally, such a record of command and control will be an ideal initiator of tutorial discussion. 4. The simulation should be realisable on a hardware/software platform of £10 000. 5. The overriding importance is that the simulation should ‘emulate as nearly as possible the feelings and stresses of the command role’.